Overland Debuts SSD Friendly SnapSAN Arrays

Posted on July 11, 2012 By Pedro Hernandez

Overland Storage took the wraps off two new SnapSAN systems, the midrange 3000 and enterprise-grade 5000, which promise to take the sting out of managing storage for private clouds and virtualized environments.

How? With automated tiering and management capabilities, data protection features and a dash of flash storage.

According to Joe Disher, director of product marketing for disk-based products at Overland, the company's approach to developing the 3000 and 5000 was to look at networked storage through a slightly different lens. Instead of advancing the SnapSAN platform for the technology's sake, his company decided to "focus on the business challenges that exist out there."

These challenges, which often overlap, include accommodating I/O-intensive applications, managing the growth of cloud services and virtual machine sprawl, and complying with ever-tightening regulatory pressures, said Disher. Key to serving so many masters effectively is "making sure that you can optimize the tiers of storage properly," he added.

AutoTune provides real-time performance monitoring and visualization and can provide trend analysis and help detect bottlenecks, said Disher, allowing administrators to set AutoTier thresholds. Lastly, AutoCache employs up to 800GB of SSD cache to accelerate virtual machines and database applications.

SnapSAN 3000 is a 2U, dual-controller array with support for 4 GB of cache per controller for a total of 16 GB. It scales up to 288 TB and supports 2.5-inch, 3.5-inch serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives and SSDs with an available encryption option.

Connectivity options include 1 GbE and 10 GbE iSCSI, 8Gb Fibre Channel (FC) and 6Gb SAS. Standard features include thin provisioning, snapshot, remote replication and volume cloning. A Disk Spin Down option helps conserve power during periods of low activity. The system is certified for the Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtualization platforms.

SnapSAN 5000 inherits the same feature set but increases per-controller memory to 8 GB, for a total of 16 GB. Also exclusive to the 5000 is a combo network controller plus the aforementioned AutoTier, AutoTune and AutoCache features. The 5000 also sports write-once, read-many (WORM) support, which boosts regulatory compliance efforts by "making sure that data is protected from deletion until the retention period is expired," explained Fisher.

SnapSAN 3000 and SnapSAN 5000 are available now. Prices start at $13,999 for the 3000 and $16,999 for the 5000 model.